Dice Heroes – Sasha Kolesnik

Art Direction / UI / Game Art

Dice Heroes

CLIENT: Personal
YEAR: 2014

This Android game was our first pet project with my future husband. It was fun to discuss together all ideas and to take part in creating concept, level design and naming but basically for this game he wrote all the code and I made all the graphics.

THE
CHALLENGE

THE CHALLENGE

We wanted to create a game that would be interesting to play for ourselves... and hopefully for some other people too. And my personal challenge was to draw all in-game graphics and UI in pixel art, as we both considered it to be the right art style for our little game.

CHARACTER
DESIGN

CHARACTER DESIGN

In Dice Heroes characters are dice. Good dice and a whole load of evil dice. They have typical rpg classes and also names (it makes them more human-like). Naming was a real fun because we used a lot of references from our favorite movies, books, games and tv series to come up with such a huge amount of names. We were so happy every time a player would write a review with something like “Wow, I noticed Firefly references on level 36!” We had a restriction of no more than 4 letters in the name because of the size of name tags, so the reference usually isn’t that obvious.

Dice can use different weapons and magic abilities placed on their sides. So apart from drawing coloured dice, which is not such a big deal, I needed to draw a number of abilities, states, effect icons and make some animations.

ENVIRONMENT
DESIGN

ENVIRONMENT DESIGN

Each level in Dice Heroes is a floating island taking place on one of the seven locations with different scenery. Drawing tiles and all sorts of environment objects was my favourite part of the whole process!

UI
DESIGN

UI DESIGN

On the main screen players can reach all levels through the map of Diceland, customize their dice, craft some potions and get some coins. All interface elements such as windows, menus, tabs, icons, buttons and so on are also designed in pixel art.

A lot of new features appeared in the game in the updates and most of them required new drawings.
These are achievement icons.

A lot of new features appeared in the game in the updates and most of them required new drawings. These are achievement icons.

THE
RESULT

THE RESULT

Dice Heroes was published on Google Play, you can get it here
All in all the game had 220k downloads, the average rating was 4+, and it earned us a honeymoon in Italy